Though the packaging runs more to the budget side of things, with scant liner notes by Nick Loss-Eaton offering a very brief history of Charles’s Swing Time recordings, more attention was obviously given to the remastering. Working from metal masters and lacquer discs, engineer Art “Shiffy” Shifrin did a great job in cleaning up the initial tracks on the CD, paying particular attention to maintaining the broad bandwidth of the original masters in an effort to duplicate the sound that the session engineers would have heard in the control room when the grooves were being cut. The remaining tracks were apparently remastered from tape sources by Moses Nagel, who used a much heavier hand in terms of noise reduction. 

Unreleased is actually more of a companion (think vol. 3) to NTI’s earlier double CD set, Ray Charles: The Complete Swing Time/Down Beat Recordings, offering up alternate takes that hadn’t yet been discovered when the latter was released in 2001. Collectors and fans of Ray Charles will want to own all 3 CDs, which together offer a complete set of his earliest, rarest tracks.